National disasters, bombings, mass shootings, and terror attacks. It's sad that these four topics have been embedded in our brains as a society and as a world. Of course, to take natural disasters off of this list, even if as a world we tried to control the weather, we simply can't. Natural disasters will always happen, because the atmosphere is unpredictable and will always create disturbances. However, that still leaves the other three topics in the front of this article that we need to discuss. For the sake of this article, and the sake of the sanity for the world, I would like to talk about three events that really shook nations to their core, two of which happened on American soil. Of course, for the sake of this article, I'm only going to give a brief summary of what happened in each of these incidents.
It was April 20, 1999. The city of Columbine, Colorado welcomed its students into Columbine High School for another day of learning, not thinking that the worst was about to come into its doors and completely overthrow the system that the school functioned upon. Two students, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, entered their very own high school with a plan: murder. These two students were smart, having fire bombs to distract firefighters while they continued to kill 13 people and injured 21 others in their path. The attack lasted around fifty minutes, with eventually the students killing themselves, so the motives for their attack unfortunately died along with them. This attack was the deadliest attack on American soil for the next 17 years. Klebold's mother, Sue, went on national television to share the story about what happened that day.
Fast forward seventeen years later, when I was attending my first gay pride in Pittsburgh, I looked up at the tv screen and saw that 50 innocent lives were taken, as well as over 50 others were injured in the Orlando nightclub shooting. This was and still is the deadliest attack by a single shooter on American soil, and the deadliest attack to occur within the LGBT+ community. The shooter had pledged his allegiance to ISIL. 39 people, including the shooter, were pronounced dead at the scene. Anderson Cooper's Emotional Tribute was aired on CNN, and if you're a member of the LGBT+ community, this may be disturbing to watch.
Lastly, I would like to acknowledge what is happening in Munich, Bavaria, Germany at the moment. At the time that this is being written, on July 22, 2016 at 3:15 p.m., not a lot of information has been released about what is happening within the city. As of this article's publication, at least six people are dead, and three shooters are being targeted as the perpetrators of this violent crime. Many German citizens were going to be going on vacation, so many inhabitants were heading out of the city to head to vacation spots for the weekend. Instead, a shooting happening at a local mall stopped them in their tracks. At this time, the shooters are still at large, and the hashtag, #opendoor is trending on German social media, allowing German residents that are stranded to seek cover immediately until the roads have been opened up to the public again.
